LITMIR.BIZ

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a cousin.”

      He didn’t like remembering it. His grandmother had died years ago. He’d had a brother, but when he was in his teens, his sibling had died in a particularly horrible way, and not one he felt comfortable telling an innocent girl about. The others, well, he had a lot of guilt about the way they went, and the memories tore at his heart like talons.

      “I’m sorry,” she said gently, touching his muscular arm.

      He looked up, surprised at her empathy.

      She shrugged. “You never talk about your past. I guess you have some memories that are pretty bad, huh?”

      He nodded. “Yeah. Pretty bad.”

      She drew her hand back. “I’ve never had the opportunity to make any real memories,” she said on a sigh. “I go to school and come home, do class work, eat, sleep, get up and do it all again, except in the summer.”

      “I get up, work, eat, sleep, go to bed.” He chuckled. “I suppose there’s some sort of comfort in the routine. No great shocks. No big surprises.”

      “It’s tedious, isn’t it?” she asked suddenly, surprising an odd look in his large brown eyes. “We don’t do much except go through the motions of living.”

      He cocked his head. “You’re pretty clued in, for a sheltered little chick.”

      “I listen,” she said simply. “I don’t have much experience of my own, but women talk. I overhear things I don’t really understand, but once in a while, a woman is nice enough to explain it to me without making it sound vulgar.”

      Both thick eyebrows went up. “Now I’m intrigued.”

      She cleared her throat. “It’s nothing I could talk about in mixed company,” she said, lowering her eyes.

      “I see. It’s that sort of conversation, is it?” he teased.

      She flushed. “Well, books and movies and television sort of hint at things, but you don’t really know, do you? It’s just secondhand.”

      “So is hearsay evidence,” he mused.

      “Now you sound like a policeman,” she accused.

      His eyes narrowed. “And you’d know that how?”

      “There’s this nice policeman who works for Chief Grier,” she said. “I have lunch in Barbara’s Cafe every Friday with Blake Kemp’s assistant. The policeman is usually having lunch there, too, with a couple of his friends. They sit next to us and we talk.” She laughed. “He’s really funny. I like him.”

      He felt an unreasonable surge of jealousy. He fought it down and even managed a convincing smile. “Your age?”

      “Oh, no, he’s closer to your age. At least, to what I think is your age,” she added, because Paul had never told her how old he was.

      “Is he new here?”

      She nodded. She leaned toward him. “There’s some gossip about him,” she said in a stealthy, mischievous tone.

      “Is there? What is it?” he asked.

      “You remember Kilraven, who was supposed to be working for the chief, but was really an undercover Fed?”

      “I remember. He married Winnie Sinclair.”

      She nodded. “Well, our policeman is apparently an undercover Fed, too, working on some mob-related criminal activity.”

      Paul’s heart jumped. He had an inkling of what that might be, but he didn’t dare tell Isabel. He still had contacts inside—well, actually, on both sides of that issue—and he didn’t want to have to admit to them. He was still raw from the past, despite the years of distance.

      “Know what it is?” he asked.

      “No,” she returned. “He isn’t telling anybody about that. I heard all about it from Mr. Kemp’s paralegal, who’s friends with the chief’s secretary, Carlie Farwalker.”

      He let out a breath. “Isabel, is there anybody you don’t know?”

      “Well, Jacobsville is a very small town. And Comanche Wells, where we live, is even smaller. I’ve lived here all my life. I know everybody. Is it like that, where you come from?” she asked, curious. “I mean, did you come from a small town?”

      He burst out laughing. “I came from Jersey,” he said. “Nothing small about New Jersey, kid.”

      “But don’t you have neighborhoods there, where people live for a long time together?”

      He thought back to his childhood, to the place he grew up. “I suppose we did. My grandmother had lived in the same house since she was married. She knew everybody in the neighborhood, and I mean everybody.”

      “So it was like here?”

      “Only if everybody here was Greek or Italian,” he said with a grin. “On my mother’s side, mostly Italian. My grandmother and her father were the only Greek blood in the family.”

      “I guess you speak Italian, too,” she said softly.

      “Italian, Greek and an odd little dialect of Farsi.”

      “Farsi?” She frowned. “Our police chief speaks that. So does Wolf Patterson’s wife, Sara. In fact, he speaks it, too. They had some extraordinary arguments in Farsi before they married.” She grinned. “I heard about it from Bonnie, who works in the pharmacy in Jacobsville.”

      “I’ll have to watch my back, so people don’t tell you girls anything about me,” he chided with twinkling brown eyes. But he wasn’t mentioning his time in Afghanistan in Special Forces.

      “Nobody knows anything about you, Paul. You’re a mystery,” she said with a sigh.

      The way she said his name made something inside him wake up. He didn’t want that.

      “I don’t talk about my past. Ever,” he said absently.

      “Oh? Were you, like, a hit man for the mob?” she teased with twinkling blue eyes.

      His face tautened to steel. His eyes blazed for an instant, and he seemed made of stone.

      “I was kidding!” she said at once, shocked at the reaction she’d provoked. “I’m sorry, really I am…!”

      He forced the anguish out of his face. It wasn’t her fault. It was nothing to do with her. She’d simply made a joke, hitting a tender spot without even knowing it.

      “No sweat,” he said, and forced a smile. “Hey, I’m Italian. We get too many mob jokes,” he added.

      “Sorry,” she said again, her voice softening. “It was a dumb remark.”

      “It’s okay.” He reached out and tweaked a long, curly strand of red-gold hair. It was the first time he’d really touched her. “I guess you get Irish jokes all the time, huh?”

      “Irish?”

      “You’re redheaded, kid,” he teased.

      His hand in her hair was provoking some very unusual stirrings in her untried body, and she was trying to pretend she felt nothing. She wasn’t successful. Paul, with his greater experience, could see everything she felt. It flattered him, that she could find him attractive.

      “Oh. Redheaded. Irish. I get it.” She laughed nervously. “No, it isn’t Irish. My father’s people were from Wales.”

      “Wales!” He laughed. “I never knew a single person from Wales.”

      “Me, neither,” she confessed. “I did try to learn a word or two of the language, but I think I sprained my tongue, so I never tried again.”

      “Sprained your tongue.” He smiled and let his attention drift down her softly rounded face, over her

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